November 18, 2021 at 12:45 am (destinations, Links, postaday, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: architecture, England, lens-artists photo challenge, Liverpool, London, memories, museums, photo challenge
This is self’s second post on the same Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Shapes and Designs. Today, she is focusing on architecture.
The London skyline is endlessly fascinating. She took these pictures the last time she was in London, November 2019:
Self has a friend who lives in Manchester. In November 2019, self went to see her, and her friend drove to nearby Liverpool. What fun to walk along the docks! The Museum of Liverpool had a very unusual design.
November 13, 2021 at 4:03 pm (destinations, Holidays, Links, Lists, Places, postaday, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: California, Christmas, Cornwall, discoveries, England, favorites, Fowey, Gardens, Palo Alto, photo challenge, Saturday
Self is new to this Photo Challenge.
She thinks her post has to do three things:
(1) Show something starting with a “T.” See below: Trellis
Gamble House, Palo Alto
(2) Show a favorite that starts with a “T”: Christmas TREE.
(3) Show a Top of a Tree: Monterey Pines grow in Fowey, Cornwall, who would have thought??? The story goes that Fowey Hall used to belong to an old sea captain who traveled to California and brought Monterey pine seeds back with him.
October 30, 2021 at 12:47 pm (destinations, Explorers, Food and Drink, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Chinese food, discoveries, England, life of B, Liverpool, memories, museums, photo challenge, restaurants
The Past Squares Challenge ends tomorrow. Becky, who hosts the challenge from Life of B, announced that the next Challenge will be in February.
The very best Chinese food in Liverpool is directly across from the Liverpool Cathedral. Self has a friend who moved to Manchester, and this friend knows all the BEST Chinese restaurants in Manchester and Liverpool.
The Museum of Liverpool, on Albert Dock, is one of those must-sees. And here is self! Who rarely appears in pictures! She’s wearing a hat given to her by a friend in Philadelphia, who told her this would be the only way to survive an English winter! Thanks much, Anne-Adele!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
October 28, 2021 at 3:24 am (Books, Recommended)
Tags: COVID Reading, England, English history, Gardens, reading lists
Author Roderick Floud has something to say about how GDP is calculated:
Activities such as housework, looking after children, or decorating homes, together with the gardening or the value of the fruit, flowers, and vegetables that are produced from it, are not counted. When there were plenty of paid gardeners, their wages would be counted as part of GDP; today, when it’s largely done by the householder, this time and effort are not.
So the role of gardening in the economy is much understated because it is largely excluded from GDP. Perhaps equally serious is the fact that few people realize how much land is taken up by gardens, nor the value of that land if it could be used for other purposes.
England’s Magnificent Gardens, p. 345
October 27, 2021 at 3:21 am (Books, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, discoveries, England, English writers, Gardens, reading lists
By 1730, the nobility and gentry of England were in the grip of what can only be described as “Pineapple Fever.” In spending $19,000 or more in one year on their “pines,” the Drakes were clearly addicted. So too must the anonymous author in Floral World a century later, in 1868; he calculated that his pine pits covered 500 square feet and contained 139 plants. The cost of fuel, tan, manure, and general maintenance, together with two hours labour every day, meant that each pineapple cost $728 to produce.
England’s Magnificent Gardens, p. 324
October 25, 2021 at 5:22 pm (Artists and Writers, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, England, Gardens, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists
The author of The Magnificent English Garden is so fastidious that he even includes the names of gardeners going back to the 16th century. And gives us fascinating details about how gardening was regarded as a legitimate career path.
The employer and his head gardener controlled every aspect of the young gardener’s life. Apprentices in other occupations could not marry, but the prohibition extended on the great estates to journeymen gardeners as well. Although both Percy Thrower and Arthur Hooper found girlfriends, there was no question of marriage for a bothy boy. When Percy Thrower joined the staff of the royal garden at Windsor, he was warned: “Keep your eyes off the head gardener’s daughters”; he didn’t, and ultimately married one of them, but the relationship had to be kept secret for years. One of his colleagues was less prudent and “came–almost on his hands and knees–to the foreman to inform him that he had to get married and would have to leave.”
The Magnificent English Garden, p. 208
October 25, 2021 at 3:37 am (Books, Recommended)
Tags: England, Gardens, inequality
October 22, 2021 at 4:32 am (Books, Links, Lists, Places)
Tags: discoveries, England, Gardens, nonfiction
1843: “The first — and apparently still the only — treatise on the subject, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and the Improvement of Churchyards” was published, by a man named John Claudius Loudon.
Cemeteries of London:
Kensal Green today: “at twilight on a winter’s evening, deserted except for the old jogger, it is still a place of peace and, nowadays, a refuge for wildlife, migrating birds, squirrels, hedgehogs, and even a weasel.” (p. 44)
October 20, 2021 at 9:03 am (Artists and Writers, Books, plans, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: England, Gardens, London
“The new king had plenty to do. He had to reestablish the monarchy, appoint his ministers and courtiers, call a new parliament, and cement relationships with the Anglican Church, which was still suspicious of his Catholic mother; not least, he had to pursue and put to death the men who had killed his father.”
England’s Magnificent Gardens, p. 23
Yet, despite all that, Charles II still found time to work on the Royal Gardens! “In St. James Park in central London, only a few hundred yards from Whitehall, he made use of unemployed soldiers to dig a huge rectangular lake, 850 yards long by 43 yards wide. He was soon “able to enjoy himself feeding the ducks on the new lake.”
He’d been king for less than a year.
October 19, 2021 at 1:04 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Food and Drink, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, England, Gardens, history, reading lists, Shakespeare
Shakespeare, writing between 1590 and 1612, does not mention “peach” except as a colour . . .
England’s Magnificent Gardens: How a Billion-Dollar Industry Transformed a Nation, from Charles II to Today, p. 7
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